


In the Sweat of Thy Brow Shall You Eat Your Bread

by xaviul



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Hemospectrum Shift
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 14:21:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16834339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaviul/pseuds/xaviul
Summary: Even your fangs had been carefully worn away, as rounded and blunt as their structure had allowed you until when you smiled at your reflection, it didn’t immediately ping as threatening.Not that you were ever daring enough to show teeth around anywhere but your section of the city. Even the kindest of intentions could turn sour on you too quickly to ever want to risk it, and so you restrained that too. Every coldblooded emotion was something for you to curb, so it didn’t lead to your downfall.Kindness was what the world valued. Temperance, an even nature, and though many believed that coldbloods where naturally incapable of it you still strived for those ideals. Though many coldbloods you knew were too proud to admit it, compliance was the only way any of you would ever live a long life that wasn’t full of suffering.In a flipped world, those at the bottom have to do what they must to survive. Vadaya Urvata knows that better than most, and always plays by the rules. No matter how much they cost him.





	In the Sweat of Thy Brow Shall You Eat Your Bread

There were rules to survival, when you had the blood you did. Any step out of place could be your undoing in a world that would sooner look at you and see a beast than a troll, and all you could do was make it harder for them to have reason to fear.

Your life was about containment, and every dusk when you climbed out of the watered-down excuse for sopor in your recuperacoon you performed every part of your life like it was the rites to a ritual. Entombing them into your mind, because only by obeying the laws of the land would you ever be able to find some semblance of peace.

It starts with hygiene, from the moment you step out from under the chill of your shower and have to face yourself in the mirror. It’s the image that everyone around you sees, that makes them always watch you from the corners of their eyes the same way one might a rabid dog that has wandered into the streets to die. No matter how lean food had been for you you had always grown broad, malnutrition bending to the will of genetics until you carried the same sort of sturdiness that marked out coldbloods at a casual glance.

That was what you had to work against, and it wasn’t easy. There was only so much you could do, but you had thrown yourself into it ever since you had first discovered as a wriggler that highbloods were more charitable to a beggar youth that ducked their horns and used their manners.

It was about smoothing out the sharp edges of your body, quite literally. It meant taking a sanding file to your claws every night so that all that was left behind was a bare crescent of keratin, perfectly rounded and incapable of the tearing and ripping that haunted the stories highbloods told of your kind.

You did the same with your horns, dulling the points in to harmlessness every night to curb any potential growth. Even your fangs had been carefully worn away, as rounded and blunt as their structure had allowed you until when you smiled at your reflection, it didn’t immediately ping as threatening.

Not that you were ever daring enough to show teeth around anywhere but your section of the city. Even the kindest of intentions could turn sour on you too quickly to ever want to risk it, and so you restrained that too. Every coldblooded emotion was something for you to curb, so it didn’t lead to your downfall.

Kindness was what the world valued. Temperance, an even nature, and though many believed that coldbloods where naturally incapable of it you still strived for those ideals. Though many coldbloods you knew were too proud to admit it, compliance was the only way any of you would ever live a long life that wasn’t full of suffering.

You’d suffered enough already. Your lusus had been deemed a danger to the public when you were four sweeps old and had left you an orphan. If you hadn’t already been near Shepherd’s community of orphaned coldbloods, you doubt you would have ever survived past that. Back then, you had been sure that the world was ending for you.

But you’d survived, scraping by on whatever you were given or what you could beg for. Never stealing, you’d seen too many lowbloods caught and punished for that when they were desperate enough to try and sneak something out under the eagle eyes of shopkeepers. Nobody ever complained if a coldblood whelp got hauled off and never seen again, not in this society. It was a relief to some, a belief that you all deserved it.

Growing up, you’d heard it all. Ferals, animals, coldbloods were victims to their emotions in a way that either drew up pity or disdain. You’d survived on the first and avoided the second whenever you could, but no one could ever escape from the crime of being hatched low forever. The highbloods would pull the collars around your necks taut for no other reason than to watch you fight, to keep you in line, or just because they suspected you of actions you’d never commited.

Even your rules couldn’t always protect you, but they helped. And that idea is what makes you reach for the heavy links of your nullifier, glinting red in the dim fluorescent lighting. It wasn’t the original nullifier you’d been assigned forever ago, that you’d worn since before you’d even realized you didn’t have psychic abilities. You had been hatched and labeled indigo, and that meant that you wore a nullifier.

It was too much of a risk to let any non-psychic walk about without one on. Too easy to slip an actual psychic in with claims of being flat until they were breaking laws with their abilities- or so the highbloods claimed. You’d bought this model because it was bright and highly visible, after you’d seen a highblood get into a fit because a Cerulean’s nullifier on her neck had been obscured by the collar of her jacket. You made no such mistake.

You twined the cold chains between your horns, fiddling with it just a bit so that the bright gem of the nullifier hung in the center of your forehead. The chains were white, to better show against your horns- and as a tribute to the sun. There were too many tales still of painted indigos who once worshiped forbidden gods, and you refused to have yourself mistaken as one of those monsters of myth.

You were almost done now, and it’s a relief as you screw the nullifier into place at the base of your horns to make sure it won’t slip when you duck your head. Your shirt for tonight is one of your least favorites, but you work tonight and that means wearing plenty of your chrome. You usually tried to keep it subdued, as subdued as you can without looking as if you are trying to hide your hue. It’s just too bright a thing, you think as you pull your shirt on and button it. If only you had been a troll hatched with darker blood, something that was easier to miss against the usual black clothing that coldbloods tended to wear.

But no, your chrome had to be bright enough to draw eyes, and purple enough to make trolls uneasy. It’s why you button your shirt collar up high, past the vestigial gills that would probably lose you your job if they came out. It’s why the back of your ears are ridged with scar tissue, when you had been young and realized that having fins was just an anchor that was holding you down to drown.

A mild Indigo, properly nullified, could find work. A seadweller was lucky if they were even allowed in to a town, and more often than not got driven away back towards the body of water they had popped out of. The ocean wasn’t an option for you, so you’d done what you had to to survive.

And it was worth it, you reminded yourself as you looked in to the mirror one last time. The troll that looked back at you seemed placid despite the bright indigo sign on his shirt, and when you pulled your shoulders in and slouched, just a bit, you liked to think you looked less massive. Horns and claws dulled, ears bare, the revealed skin of your body unscarred… You’d never pass as properly unaggressive, but this was the closest you could ever get.

You pulled yourself out of the bathroom and almost straight in to the chest of one of your roommates in the hivestem. Haitra was another Indigo, but she was the one kind, one of Raphae’s ilk- she took one look at your appearance and made a low sound of disgust in the back of her throat, one of those coldblood feral noises that some of them delighted in leaning into.

“Off to lick boots already?” She ribbed at you, looking for a reaction you refused to give her. They all did this, all poked at you like they wanted to prove that you could explode like the rest of them. Like they needed to pull you off some pedestal that only they saw- or like crabs in a container, that old adage used to show just how animalistic coldbloods could be.

“I am off to work,” you reply, keeping your voice as light as your tones could go and hating how deep it still was. No one trusted deep voices, coldblood voices, but you’d worked so hard to strip away the language of the community from your words to make up for it. You don’t duck your horns for her the way you would a highblood, you don’t make sure your wrists are bared and visible- it’s a flickering thought to, but you aren’t looking to give her more reasons to criticize you. Her moment of outrage wasn’t worth the repercussions.

They never were. “Please let me by, Haitra, I need to get going.” She rumbles again at your request, lip curling enough to show the curved expanse of a fang that was too sharp to ever get her employed. “Whatever, faker, ain’t stopping ya am I?” She drawls, and you duck by her and towards the front door, escaping before any of your other roommates rouse to bother you further.

It was hard, living with four other Indigos in a space built for two. Five others sometimes, when Vaitra’s kismesis practically moves in for weeks at a time. You hate it, and all your spare money you scrape together is saved for a better hivestem. It’s just that no one trusts a solitary Indigo to provide steady rent money in the city, and no one above Cerulean wants to take on an Indigo roommate.

But you make a reminder to yourself to buy a newspaper tonight after work and see if there’s any new options to try. There were highbloods who were kind enough to trust you, just as your employer did.

Bloomjoy had hired you to unload his shipments for her- it was physical labor, hard labor, but trusting an Indigo to do it had been cheaper than hiring a telekinetic. She treated you well enough, you thought- better than most others could claim, since she often left you to get your work done on your own. The only rules were to get things stored in their places and to not look at them, both of which you were happy to provide. Because highbloods who paid coldbloods under the table for labor were never on the most legal of streets, and you didn’t want to become a scapegoat if things became shaky for her.

The less you knew, the better. You’d been working for her for over five perigees now, every other night, and you appreciated the stability of it. Maybe in six perigees your work history would be steady enough for a landlord to trust that you could pay your rent- maybe in six perigees you could have a full-sized coon, with pure sopor that your roommates wouldn’t steal and consume.

So many possibilities, and though part of you always ached at the ‘maybes’ the rest of you was resigned. It was the way of the world for lowbloods, and those who fought against it always paid for it in the end. Life would always be unfair, but the most you could ever do is try and even the odds a little further in your favor. Only by playing by the rules could you ever dare to dream about making a comfortable living for yourself.

You knew that better than anyone else, you didn’t dare try and convince yourself otherwise like Raphae and his band. Long after they’ve all been culled or sent to labor camps for their crimes against the Empyrean, you’d still be here and if not happy, happier than they were.

And all you had to do was constantly chase after ideals that you could never measure up to, and take whatever scraps you could.

That was enough for you. It had to be.


End file.
